


So Heavy I Fell Through The Earth

by BadWolf256



Series: Miss Anthropocene [1]
Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:54:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26325982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadWolf256/pseuds/BadWolf256
Summary: A look at what might have happened if it was Elijah, and not Damon, who turned Elena in the season four ending, the night of and many years later.Part one of angsty Elejah oneshots based offMiss Anthropoceneby Grimes.
Relationships: Elena Gilbert/Elijah Mikaelson
Series: Miss Anthropocene [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1912957
Comments: 2
Kudos: 38





	So Heavy I Fell Through The Earth

Elena Gilbert wakes up in the back of a car.

Her ears are filled with the sound of the motor; the buzzing of lights through the window. Elijah’s nails tap on the steering wheel rubber. It sounds like gunshots, to her. The oncoming headlights are blinding, and a loud, aching place that has never been in her makes her skin itch and gums throb.

“You turned me,” She says, to the man she’d once thought she could trust.

“You were going to die,” Says Elijah. There’s nothing in him - no remorse, she thinks, no relief. Just the sound of his voice, the same as it’s always been, and the longing in her to bury her teeth deep inside him. Elena is wearing his jacket. It must be three sizes too big.

She wonders when he took it off.

“Where are we going?” She asks him, pulling herself into sitting. She hates Elijah, but she cannot hate Elijah. She longs for the life - the real, _human_ life - that she has not yet had time to lose.

“Somewhere you can feed,” Says Elijah, and sneaks a glance at her through the impeccably clean rear-view mirror, “Or somewhere you can die.”

“I don’t want to do this,” She says. Elijah does not answer her. Her arms are warm in his jacket, but still they are coated in goosebumps. Through the window, she sees Mystic Falls, blurring into the distance. She bites down on the inside of her cheek and tastes her own coppery blood.

*

When Elena dreams, she dreams in humanity. The names and the memories of the men she has tried to kill haunt her; the ones she has killed only scream. It’s the kind of screaming that Damon did, once, when Alaric died in his arms. The same lone, ragged howl that came out of her when she stumbled on Jeremy’s corpse, and so she does not let herself dream. On the nights when her eyes grow weary, she slips her way out of bed and onto the city streets. They are coated in darkness and filth and the bloodstains of centuries past. And as Elena walks down them, she can feel every stabbing that happened at every street corner, the way the girls laughed as they said goodnight to their boyfriends and traipsed up wood-paneled porch stairs. They tell her the same thing that everyone does:

Elena has been here too long, and she is no longer herself.

At some point before it is light out, she ducks inside of the bar. The scent of Elijah clings to his barstool, still, and the last forty years flash behind her eyes like lightning. She takes a good, hard breath of it - it is yeast and scotch and powdered sugar, black ink and spearmint, cinnamon and coriander. It is everything that she runs from, and all that she’s yearned for since the day that she left him behind. _Always and forever,_ Elijah once told her. But then, she thinks, as she swirls her whiskey around, that was before she had one.

She knows what he’d think of her now.

*

“You weren’t lying,” She says. He has helped her out of the car; she can’t even blink and there is Elijah, holding his hand out to her. It is infinitely more inviting than anyone’s has been in months, and as she slips her fingers through his, it strikes her how surreal it is that Elijah, who never shares blood with anybody, has tied her to undeath with his.

“After you,” Says Elijah, beckoning to the farmhouse’s threshold. It was a good place for him to choose, thinks Elena. Damon will be gone for a long time yet, and no one will look for her here. There is nobody for her to kill while she waits for her own life to end.

“Are you going to tie me?” She asks him.

“To what?” He asks her, “The furnishings?”

“I don’t know,” Says Elena. “I didn’t exactly have time to look around.”

Elijah laughs, when she says it, but the laugh is not joyful, she thinks. It is, she realizes with a pang - _sad._

“You didn’t want this for me either,” She says, and a low sigh escapes out of him.

“You will sit on your own,” Says Elijah. “I wish to speak with you, Elena. Much has happened since I departed.”

“Alright,” Says Elena, “Ok.”

She does not question how quickly her will to run dies - there’s a voice in her head that says she does not want to be here, that longs for the river and its icy cold, or a bed to lie down in and have it done peacefully; fast, while she is asleep. Instead she finds herself sitting on the same couch where she was held hostage, once, blood staining her pastel pink shirt sleeve, crossing her unsteady legs. The scent of her strong fear still lingers, even after all of these months. She sits with him for what seems like an eternity, until he swallows and speaks.

“How are you feeling?” He asks her.

“Honestly?” Asks Elena.

Elijah purses his lips.

“I want blood, Elijah,” She tells him. The moment she says it, nothing else seems to exist, except him and her and the _promise_ of it, rich and warm and flowing through living veins.

“That can be arranged,” Says Elijah. “First, though, Elena. You will tell me those things which Niklaus deemed unimportant.”

“Where should I start?” Asks Elena, more breathless than she would like.

“The beginning,” He tells her. “Naturally, the beginning.”

She thinks a look of surprise shifts across him, and for one single, gleaming instant, she thinks of what they could have been. Her tongue darts out to swipe her bottom lip, and his sharp gaze takes note of the movement.

“I am not known for my patience,” He tells her, the barest hint of a growl coming into his words. “Tell me what Niklaus will not, Elena. I _demand_ it of you.”

“I - _fuck,_ ” Elena says, cursing. This time, his hands are gentle when they yank the necklace from her, but it makes them no less devastating.

“Start from the beginning,” Elijah instructs her. “Take all the time that you need.”

“Elijah,” Elena says -

Wanting to kiss him, and wishing that she did not want.

“ _Tell me,_ ” He says.

And she does.

*

Elena finds it too easy. It was Damon who first named the method, but Elena learned from Elijah - _No,_ she thinks, as she tracks her way through the crowd for the pleasure of choosing her victim, she taught _herself_ how to do it. Now, as she wends her way out the crowded doors to stalk the girl in the red satin scarf, a smile flits over her lips involuntarily. Damon could never have done what she does like she does. He cared too much for it, she thinks. And Elijah - he had not wanted it for her. Had told her, always, that she was a compassionate soul. Funny then, Elena thinks, that his blood was what robbed her of it.

In the old days, when Elena slept underneath lonely bridges in cities that weren’t on the map, she hunted during the day. There was something of a thrill inside that; stealing someone from their lover the second that they turned around. But now Elena is back in New Orleans, the city Elijah helped build. The air tastes of mangoes and salt and tobacco, and everyone who is anyone knows it is only worth living at night. Rebekah once told her that it was a shame, her not feeling things, because it is a _wondrous_ city. What place, though, she thinks, does _wondering_ have, when there is fresh blood to be had? When Elena was eighteen, she dreamed of a man in a dark tuxedo who treated her like she was real; as if Elena were herself, not some plaything shaped like Katerina.

Now she follows the girl in the red satin scarf, holding her life in her hands.

*

“Do you want something to drink?” Asks Elijah. She does not know if he means blood or booze, and begins to think she doesn’t care. This isn’t the life that she wanted. Elena had hoped for a family, someday. A place that she could call her own. Elijah Mikaelson’s doomed her, again. But when he looks at her with that one, inscrutable look, she finds herself yearning to please him. To make up for all she’s done wrong.

“How long do I have?” Asks Elena. She feels him checking his wristwatch. Hears it tick through the room. She sits on the couch by herself, missing his solid heat; the only thing in the whole of the world she’s entirely certain won’t hurt her.

“Fifteen hours,” He says.

“Fifteen hours,” She tells him. “Yeah, I could drink to that.”

Elena thinks he might be smiling, then, but she’s never been able to tell.

Inside the barn, it is hot, and she’s shrugged off Elijah’s suit jacket. Is wondering whether she is the same, or if the changes are already starting within her, waiting for her to loose them from their thorny cage. If she doesn’t drink, she will die. If she doesn’t die, she will kill. If she doesn’t kill, she may still be herself, but it will be just a bane.

“What are you thinking about?” Asks Elijah, pressing a glass of something cold and amber into her trembling hands.

“Stefan,” Elena says, “Damon. My - My _brother,_ Elijah. Jeremy. I can’t just leave them behind.”

“Then don’t,” Says Elijah. He says it as if it’s the simplest thing in the world, and Elena shakes her head. Vehemently, she thinks, and more than a small bit afraid.

“Elijah,” She tells him, “I _can’t._ ”

“You underestimate yourself,” He remarks. Elena watches him sip. He takes slight sips, she thinks. Savors the drink like every afternoon they’ve spent together. She can see that much inside of his eyes, and though she knows she should hate herself for it, she feels something warm bloom in her.

*

When the girl with the red satin scarf stops, she stops. She knows every trick in Elijah’s vast repertoire - knows how to approach casually and lure; how to snap a man’s neck before he even knows she is there. But Elena feels like something different, tonight. Something that could get her in trouble, just once more, for old times’ sake. She wants to throw her back to the wind, feed in the open where anybody could see her. It is New Orleans, thinks Elena, where the locals stay back and the fresh blood never stops flowing, but there are places she could go where the same rules do not apply. The girl, she is not from around here. And when she pauses to take a drag from a slow-burning cigarette, Elena feels her muscles tense up to pounce. _You don’t want to do this,_ a voice in her head says, a voice that she remembers well. But it’s been a long time, Elena thinks, since he had control over her.

With her hair blowing wild and the veins snaking out from her eyes, Elena leaps at her prey. She will not tell the girl not to scream; she _wants_ the city to hear her. She _wants_ to be punished for this. _What were you thinking?_ Elijah would say, but she cannot think of that now. There is blood in her mouth, rubbing over her fangs and sliding its way down her throat. Hot blood, fresh from the vein. And what she is thinking, as she drains the life from the girl with the red satin scarf, is that there is no such thing as love.

“Fancy seeing you here,” She hears, as Niklaus steps from the shadows. “You’re doing well for yourself.”

“I left him,” She says - not sure if he is there or if she is, still, always cursed. Sixty-five years, she thinks, after killing that _fucking_ Hunter, and she feels even now that her mind is not hers alone. It’s been years since she saw a vision, but she’d rather a vision than Klaus.

“Like I said love,” Niklaus says, a smirk widening on his face, “You’re doing well for yourself. Better than she is,” He adds, notching his head towards the girl with the red satin scarf. It’s a different shade of red now, she thinks, and the girl’s breath has slowed to a halt, but there is not one part of her that regrets it.

“You should come home soon,” Says Klaus, and Elena holds back a snort. What kind of a fool is he, she wonders, not to know what all of them know? She may have cared about his brother, once, but this isn’t her home anymore.

*

“You may stay here as long as you wish,” He had told her, and now she is sleeping with him. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but she had slipped under the covers, hands fisting his linen sheets, and as the tears had begun to run down her face, Elijah had come to the bedside. The mattress had dipped underneath his weight, and Elena had wanted, so much more than anything else, to press her lips onto his; to sleep, for one night, and not wake up in the morning. He had said nothing to her, merely stroked her hair, the dark knots yielding to his practiced touch.

“Lovely Elena,” He’d told her, breathing it out on a whisper, “You’ll be beautiful when you turn.”

“I’m not going to turn,” She had said.

“Even so,” He had told her, “If you rethink your decision - “

“Elijah,” She’d told him, “I won’t.”

“But if you do,” He had told her, “Know that I will stand by you. I will remain by your side and teach you as best I know how.”

In the long, gaping silence that followed, she’d looked into Elijah’s eyes. Vampire or not, she had known that he still could compel her, but she’d found that she could not shrink away from how he had cared about her, nor could she pretend she’d not seen it. Unbidden, one hand had reached up to trace at the set of his jaw, but he’d turned away ever so slightly.

“I do hope that you reconsider,” He’d said. “It would be a shame if the world were to lose a soul as compassionate as yours.”

_Carry it with you,_ Elijah had said in his letter, _Always and Forever._ She’d wondered if he’d really meant it; staring at him, caught in the spell of his gaze, she’d thought that, perhaps, he might have. And though she had never known him to say something he didn’t mean, she had hoped against hope that he had - that the fate of her future, however doomed it may be, would not be based on a woman that could not exist anymore.

“It isn’t a gift,” She had said, into the lamplit space of the farmhouse’s rickety bedroom. For a second he’d tightened, but then something had seemed to melt, the last of the coolness that rested inside of him fading to tender concern. “It’s a curse, Elijah. Having to - to _love_ like I do, you don’t understand what it feels like!”

“There may be some truth in that,” He had told her, his voice soft and steady and calm, “But I’ve seen enough of the world to know that no curse is entirely without blessings. There is something about you, Elena - You are utterly, _truly_ yourself, and it would be a crime for someone to take that from you.”

“But you have,” Elena had said. As she’d twisted from him, she had felt the knife twist in her gut. “You turned me, Elijah, when I didn’t want to be turned. I thought - “

“What?” He had asked her, “That out of the rest, I would give you a choice? You know me too well,” He’d told her, “You’re right, I will give you a choice. But I will not allow you to damn yourself without knowing what you’re giving up.”

“And how do you know?” Elena had asked him, “That I would be damning myself?”

In a flash, they had been side by side. He had cradled her flush to the hard, solid plane of his body; his hands had ran their way over her with a certain, near-loving pressure that had soothed away the worst of Elena’s self-loathing. Was that what it had been, she had wondered, self-loathing? With Elijah’s hands on her, and his hot breath so close to her skin, it had seemed far too easy not to ask herself questions like that - to give in, instead, to the rush of worry and heartfelt caring that had poured itself off him in waves.

“I can’t,” She had told him. “I’m sorry, ok? I just can’t.”

“So you sit idly by and do nothing,” He’d said, running a warm line down her cheekbone that felt, to her, oddly like crying, “While the rest of us suffer for you?”

“What should it matter to you if I die?” Elena had asked him. “You won’t have to hate Klaus anymore. You’ll have your family, Elijah; no more Petrovas to worry about.”

Elijah had not answered her - she’d feared, as she said it, that something in it went too far - but then he had stroked over that spot which pulling her upwards had given him access to. A shudder had ripped its way through her that had _nothing_ to do with being afraid, and the smirk that had graced him had told her that he knew it, too.

“You feel too much,” Elijah had told her, “And think about things too little. We are opposites in that, I feel.”

“What do you want me to do?” She had asked him, “Just - be like you, because you’re _asking_ me too? Elijah, that’s not how it works. I promised myself that I wouldn’t do that, again, after -”

“They don’t deserve you,” Elijah had said, his voice brooking no arguments.

“Then you should show me what I’m missing.”

Now, as she stares at the ticking clock, watches his white curtains sway, Elena thinks of her home. Mystic Falls - what a town to grow up in, she thinks. She wonders where she should be right now if Elijah had taken her with him, the very first time that they met. The sheets are sticky with sweat and salt and the words that they cannot take back; Elijah’s fingers are curled around her waist, and, in his sleep, he looks boyish, as if he were not the kind of man who ripped people’s heads from their bodies. Elena’s too gone to regret it. Elijah was right - she had underestimated herself.

And she thinks of her mother, keen eyes gleaming with determination, not wanting a child, not really, but wanting to be who she was? Wouldn’t you give everything up, just to be who you _were?_ Elena thinks she doesn’t know, but Elijah is giving a chance to her, and she’d be an idiot to turn down what he so freely offers. Not now, when she’s seen and felt him; and he looks and feels like he could be any other man. And she thinks of her brother - the smiles they shared, when it was them against everything, even when they were fighting. She thinks of her first kiss; it pales in comparison. She feels like herself, and she is dying, again. Every bone in her body _hurts._ Her body is starving for blood; her veins are rubbing like sandpaper up inside her, and the darkness makes her head pound. Even Elijah’s hands on her are too much.

“Elijah,” She says, her voice a hoarse, aching wound. “ _Elijah,_ ” She says, “I need -”

He stirs into waking far too composed, and a smile emerges, so rare and fleeting that she wants to hold it there with him forever. When he touches their noses and moves to lower his lips, Elena pushes him back.

“I need blood, Elijah,” She tells him, unable to look at his face. The last thing she feels as a human girl is the brush of his lips on her forehead, and the sound of a blood bag ripped open to the beat of his insistent footsteps.

*

“You don’t have to do this,” She says.

“Nonsense,” Klaus tells her, “I’ve missed you, Elena Petrova.”

Elena winces to herself. She wishes that he would stop calling her that. She hasn’t called herself that in a long time, and then only did it to hurt him. She’s forgotten how Niklaus Mikaelson is when he has nobody else beside him; wonders to herself if Rebekah’s back inside a box. If Kol is watching from the Other Side, waiting to gut her the very first chance that he gets. She does not rightly know about that and she does not rightly want to; she wants to go someplace where no one can find her, where Elijah’s looming shadow doesn’t lay waste to her like a Hunter whenever she closes her eyes.

“Then why did you come to New Orleans?” Niklaus asks. She hadn’t realized she’d said it out loud, but it draws a laugh out of her.

“Where else should I have gone?” Asks Elena, “Back to the Salvatores?”

She raises an eyebrow at him, and Niklaus rolls his eyes. They have an easy camaraderie, now that they’ve finally stopped trying to kill each other and everyone else that they love. Sometimes when Elena sees him - which is more than ever, these days - she’d almost say they were _friends._

“We aren’t friends,” Klaus tells her. _Come home with me,_ Elena hears, hidden not too far below. She really does loathe him for that. “You don’t belong here,” He says, when she sees fit to ignore him.

“Yeah,” Says Elena, “Well, I don’t belong with you either, Klaus. And I sure as _hell_ don’t belong with Elijah.”

A look of regret - more than regret, she thinks, anger - passes through him.

“He cried over you,” Niklaus says.

“My brother died,” She tells him.

And Elena thinks that she never loved him. That it was not love, what they had, but that it could have been, if Connor Jordan never came after Jeremy. They’d spent twenty-five years together, trading those low, longing glances and feverish touches at night. Whenever she’d cried, he had kissed her. When he’d fallen silent, she’d ran her fingers up his leg; felt the hum of his skin, and the taut, poised pull of his muscles clenched beneath his suit pants.

She can say whatever she wants to Niklaus, but she is already walking towards him, and he’s already walking away.

*

“Does everyone feel like this?” She asks. Her hands are stained scarlet, and blood bags litter the floor. It is so pure, so sweet, that she knows she’ll never get enough.

“No,” He says, “But control comes with time, and we have plenty of that.”

“You’re right,” Says Elena. “I do.”


End file.
